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18/10/2005

Edward Burtynsky, Stephen Chambers

Flowers East, London

Two Exhibitions

Edward Burtynsky 'New Works from the China Series'

Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky’s long awaited new China works will be unveiled in a major show at Flowers East this October. Simultaneous exhibitions in New York, San Francisco and Toronto are all releasing this new body of work for the first time.

These large format, monumental photographs focus on both the historic and newly established zones of Chinese industrialisation.

Burtynsky’s cityscapes are powerfully immediate, capturing high-density centres such as Shanghai with startling richness and detail. In other works, he explores villages dedicated solely to recycling electronic waste, plastics and metals where the painstaking sorting is carried out by hand.

The shipyard photographs (see above) with their strong, angular shapes are deceptively statuesque and beautiful, considering the large-scale industrial processes they represent. The internal vistas of endless factory floors create a powerful impact; the uniformity, rhythm and repetition of the compositions are mesmerising.

Using diplomatic channels, Burtynsky gained rare access to these sites, creating images that are at once arresting and unsettling. The photographs afford a privileged glimpse of the vast social and economic transformations currently underway in China.

They portray a civilisation that is striving to move forward to join the front rank of modern nations. The exhibition coincides with the release of Burtynsky’s major new book, ‘Burtynsky-China’, published by Steidl.

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Stephen Chambers 'The Martydom of St Ursula'

Prints made at the Scuola Internazionale Di Grafica di Venezia

At the end of August Stephen Chambers travelled to the Scuola Internazionale Di Grafica in Venice, where he is currently undertaking a three-week printmaking residency. During this time he will have the opportunity to channel his experience of the city into the making of a new body of work, culminating in this exhibition at Flowers Graphics.

The residency is run annually by London based printers Mike Taylor and Simon Marsh, who collaborate in Venice each year with a different artist. During the intensive three-week program, the artist is encouraged to explore a range of technical processes, before focusing on and developing a particular strand. The unique, rich surroundings of the city will invariably lend itself to the nature and quality of the final work.

For Chambers, an experienced printmaker, this will provide a valuable opportunity to continue and expand his ongoing creative process. His prints are both immediately and enduringly seductive, depicting fantastical dreamlike sites, often with figures suspended in abstract space.

Chambers’ rich, intense work resonates with a darker psychological force, engaging the viewer in ‘a kind of silent conversation’. As the artist writes, ‘My paintings speak of states of mind, behaviours and sensibilities’.

Stephen Chambers studied at Winchester School of Art and St Martin's and completed an MA at Chelsea School of Art. Since then he has won various scholarships and awards, including the Rome Scholarship, a fellowship at Winchester School of Art, and at Kettles' Yard / Downing College, Cambridge. His first solo exhibition took place at the Winchester Gallery in 1987, touring to the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool.

Since then he has shown extensively both nationally and internationally, and has work in various collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the V&A museum and the Arts Council, Great Britain.

Image: Edward Burtynsky

Opening: 19 October

Flowers East
82 Kingsland Road - London
Hours: Tuesday/Saturday 10am-6pm, Sunday 11am-5pm

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